Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Scottish Shortbread Cookies #FantasticalFoodFight

Scottish Shortbread Cookies are a new Christmas favorite!

Welcome to this month’s Fantastical Food Fight, hosted by
Sarah at a Fantastical Sharing of Recipes!
This month’s theme is shortbread cookies and I have to admit, I was less
than enthusiastic when I saw the theme.

You see, my only experience with shortbread comes in the form
of stale, store-bought shortbreads in a tin.
Hard, flavorless rocks. Yuck.

Then I started doing some research and trying to figure out
the difference between shortbreads, sugar cookies, and butter cookies. It turns out that the difference ends up
primarily being the ratio of butter to sugar.
Shortbreads have the highest amount of butter to the lowest amount of
sugar (this did not ease my mind).
Shortbreads also have the fewest ingredients.

Traditionally, shortbreads have only 3 ingredients added in a
1:2:3 ratio. 1 part sugar, to 2 parts
butter, to 3 parts flour (by weight). As
the years have passed, some additional ingredients have been added to
shortbreads to ensure a tenderer cookie, namely cornstarch.

The recipe I found also swapped the white sugar for brown
(lending an additional boost of flavor), and added a pinch of salt.

The resulting cookies were AMAZING!!! I typically don’t like cookies unless they
have chocolate (or at least frosting), but these are the exception to that
rule. Though some have a very light
glaze (to bring out the design), I left the majority of the cookies plain.

My family loved them so much that I had to make a second
batch just one week later (and I suspect a third batch before Christmas!)

Though I will still make sugar cookies each year (they’re my
favorite for decorating), shortbreads are rising up as a favorite, by far!